Five For Friday May 22, 2015

(Singing nice and sweetly) Goodbye, goodbye…..we had a happy time…….Goodbye….Goodbye….we had a happy time!

Wow! We’re done! 180 days of school for the year 2014-15 are complete!!

(huge sigh here)

This is the year where I truly felt that I learned just as much as my precious kinder cubs did.

And it is because, of great professional development I took, observing my kiddos more to see what made them tick, great educational resources I read, and knowing it was ok if something didn’t work then go ahead and change and do something new.

Well here is my Five for Friday link up with Doodle Bugs Teaching. Hope you get a tidbit from it and go on over to her blog and link up with us!!

I spent last weekend and Monday and Tuesday working on my kinders memory books. Last year, I created them all digitally using power point and Picassa. This year, it really didn’t take me as long as last year. I just love the way they turn out. And they are a treasure for my kiddos for sure! Since our mascot is a tiger cub, I use that theme throughout the book. Also, we have a behavior acronym for the word ROAR: Respectful, Obedient, Attentive, and Responsible. So it makes for an easy set up on these memory books. On the front cover, we glue the pawprint with the picture that we use on our display wall for the year. Here is a pic of where the paws were used all year:

The next page says: We got off to a roaring start:

Then there were 2 pages about “Grrr”eat Things That Happened and More “Grr”eat Things That Happened:

Next was a page using our class picture:

Finally, for the last page, I had these cute tiger cubs that my husband made and we glued a head shot of each child on the cub. During the year, these cubs are in the classroom on a wall. Here, they are on my classroom door:

Here is the page where we glue them:

I get clear polymer sheets for the front and cardstock for the back. Then, I bind each one using our binding machine at school.

Picassa has a great collage making section. If you would like more details on how I did these, or even copies of my pages, please email me. I’m more than happy to help you!!! I can send you the power point pages and you can insert your own pics.

For our gifts this year, I found these cute tote bags for the girls at Dollar Tree. I wanted to make tags that said, “Have a “tote”ally cool summer!”, but I just simply ran out of time. For the boys, I found some sand buckets. For both items, I filled them with light up rings, sidewalk chalk, bubbles, princess wands for girls, hot wheels for the boys, candy, and flying disks. Yes, I go hogwild! I just can’t help myself!!

Since our End of Year Celebration was in the morning, I set up a table of light breakfast goodies. The pic above shows the yogurt bar: vanilla yogurt, granola, strawberries, raspberries, blueberries. My mom helped with manning the table for me and she told me that a lot of the kids and parents loved this!

Thanks to Doodle Bugs Teaching, I decided to also have a cereal bar. It was a big hit!!

Then, on the table was also some muffins, mini bagels and sausage balls:

It all was a nice spread of light breakfast foods. For drinks, we had coffee, and orange and apple juice.

We have a nice pod area outside our classrooms, so the parents and kids were able to eat there.

It was a fun morning!

On Thursday, we went outside and played on the playground for about an hour. As we were out there, I noticed that one of my boys, found a cup and started working on this flower arrangement. He worked on it for at least 20 minutes! When we came in he gave it to me. I just had to take a picture! I thought it was just too cute and so sweet of him.

I don’t know about you, but I love getting these kinds of gifts for the end of the year. I went ahead an hung it up in my house.

My parents also collected money for a nice gift card for me and my parapro. All of it meant a lot to me and my para named Lois….sweet Lois!!

All year long we have calendar time EVERY day!! It is very important and there is so much to teach during this time and they learn so many skills! These pics are from the last day. Our number of the day was our countdown to how many days left in school. Yesterday, we were down to ZERO!!

Well, that is about it for this week. I want to insert my end of year power point that just makes me cry when I watch it. I put it on You Tube so I got permission from my class parents to post it.

For our program, the kids come into the classroom singing our good morning song, and then they perform about 3 songs that relate to things they learned. Then, I present the power point and call it “A Year in Pictures”. Again, I make this using Picassa. Picassa has a sections called: make a move. It was not difficult at all!!

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Hi! I am a kindergarten teacher who is passionate about her job! I am a christian woman who has been married for over 30 years. I have 2 terrific married children with awesome spouses! I also have a 9 year old and 5 month old granddaughter! I am truly blessed beyond measure!!